Attention children of the '90s: you can still get McDonald's pizza

You just have to drive to Ohio or West Virginia to get it

McDonald's pizza isn't gone entirely... but you have to be willing to make quite the trek to find it. Photo: Nam Y. Huh/ Associated Press

Ashley Csanady

Published: January 20, 2015 - 3:46 PM

Updated: February 2, 2015 - 2:21 PM

Remember the crunch of the cornmeal crust? And the stringy cheese, with a slightly sweeter-than normal marinara underneath?

Maybe you shoved french fries in it like birthday candles. Or ate it crust first, as was the style at the time.

In any case, if you’re a child of the nineties, you remember it well: McDonald’s pizza.

And, like pogs and Beanie Babies, it too disappeared with the innocence of your childhood.

Except, in two magical locations in Ohio and West Virginia, where one hero owner has kept the McDonald’s pizza ovens burning all these years later.

So bust out a gel pen to jot down these directions, because I’m about to tell you where you can still buy McDonald’s pizza.

Neslted on the banks of the Ohio River, along the border with West Virginia sits the village of Pomeroy, population 1,852 in the 2010 census. And its McDonald’s, located along Main Street on the riverbank, still pumps out pizza — in five minutes or less, of course.

It’s just a seven-and-a-half hour drive from Toronto in zero traffic, according to Google Maps.

And, thanks to owner Greg Mills, there’s another McD’s where you can still get a slice, just over ninety kilometres away, across the state border. Spencer, West Virginia also boasts a McDonald’s that’s still lighting the pizza fires — or electrical coils, as the case may be.

According to employee Judy Norman, it’s the same pizza as they sold when she started there 11 years ago and it’s presumably the same that children everywhere enjoyed throughout the 1990s. She said the location sold 13 pizzas yesterday, but there are “days when everyone wants pizza and there are days where just every so often you get a pizza [order].”

Mills, who it’s pretty safe to call an American hero for preserving this very unique pizza, couldn’t not be immediately reached for comment, but this post will be updated should he return our calls.

Whatever actually happened to McDonald’s pizza, you ask?

Well, for starters, it turned out adult palates didn’t quite take to it the same way kids did. When McDonald’s first launched its pizza in the Canadian market in the early ’90s, it was tapping into a growing appetite for pizza as burger sales dwindled. It even launched hockey-themed TV ads.

The market for the savoury pie topped $2 billion in the early 90s, according to a 2004 National Post article on the death of McDonald’s pizza. And the company poured $25 million into the ovens alone across Canada, to moderate success throughout the decade. Then the-drive through took over — remember waiting for your pizza to be delivered with a plastic number on top of your car? — and pizza slowed things down as its own sales were dragging.

So the ovens were scrapped and McDonald’s turned its sights on other gimmicky productions — like the Arch Deluxe, which I think we can blame for Jessica Biel becoming a thing.

The saddest clarification of all time: As first reported by Metro Montreal and translated by Emergent, it appears there’s some confusion as to whether the pizza being sold at these two locations is the McPizza we all remember. Unfortunately, McDonald’s headquarters says it’s not the exact recipe, but it’s also reviewed online as being very close. So, the only way to sure is a road trip followed by a taste test. Canada.com will surely keep you abreast if we ever get around to doing that.